Here, to discover every day until May 18th, the 13 poems by Sandeep
Bhagwati who inspired his lastest creation Niemandslandhymnen.

IX — Avarice

By greed or lust, we hasten to disseminate
Our dividend gospel, our psalm of perpetual profit,
We chant the sapphire sutra of snowballing wealth, we speculate,

Sing surahs on sukuks [1], intone hymns on hedge funds as if they were words of the
prophet.
With spreadsheets as our epiphanies, let us elevate our rejoicing to feverish corporate
pitch:
Let our capital canticles circle the globe, dim the sun, and ascend into lucrative orbit!

There our credo on eternal gains may make gods laugh, but it precipitates humans, all humans
alike, poor and rich,

Who every day gamble their soul on the specious premise that, once in a proximate future, our
voracious accumulations will allow us the means to re-liven

The landscapes, the oceans, the skies we so coldly abandoned in haste to pursue our fanatic,
insatiable itch,

And by terra (re) forming our wizened biosphere, one fine day, maybe, perchance, to redeem our
species for scorching the ground beneath our feet while we had recklessly striven

To make all of it our own, to ravish, exploit it to pieces, to lacerate its beauty, rip into its
intricate web of relations, to renounce our future, its unbounded, fertile, inconvertible
promise

Through matterless manipulations of the given.

a debt-financing tool in Islamic economies that loopholes religious laws against charging
interest.